Free A Hundred Thousand Worlds by Bob Proehl

of them are, in a way, blessed that none of the characters under their current control are being considered for Hollywood treatment.
    “Who
will
they let me gender-bend?” Gail asks.
    “You can gender-bend me any day of the week,” Ed says, leaning in and fixing her with his best fanboy leer.
    “There’s not enough compassion in all of Metro City for me to mercy-fuck you, dear,” Gail says, and dusts off her beer.

Eating Habits
    T he book is too good to put down for something as minor as food, so Alex sits cross-legged on the floor and devours the last chapter of
Adam Anti & the Wild Wild Life
simultaneously with a small bucket of microgreens.
    When it’s over, he slams the book shut, which is one of his favorite things to do. He prefers hardcover books for this reason; although they are bulkier and harder to carry around, they make a much more satisfying noise when slammed.
    “I’m done,” he says proudly. He gives his mother a huge, toothy grin. Bits of microgreens have filled every possible space between his teeth, and she makes a disgusted face.
    “Oh my God, go brush right now,” she says, laughing. Alex rushes to the bathroom and makes the same face at himself in the mirror he’s made for his mother. He looks like a hideous monster that lives at the bottom of the sea. It’s one of the main reasons to eat microgreens, although it doesn’t work unless you eat them in huge, chomping mouthfuls. His mother, he knows, has been expert at using disgusting biological quirks to get him to eat things most kids find repellent. He eats asparagus because it makes his pee smell funny, beets because they make him poop red, and microgreens because they make him look like a hideous monster that lives at the bottom of the sea. Alex vigorously brushes his teeth and watches the lime-colored spit, thick with chunks, swirl down the drain.
    “So tell me about your day,” his mom says as he comes back into the room and starts putting on pajamas. It’s a silly request, since he’s spentmost of the day rocking back and forth on the folding chair next to hers or sitting on the floor against the wall, writing in his notebook.
    He shrugs. “I finished my book,” he says. He thinks about showing her the picture Brett drew for him, but he worries about trying to tell her the beginning of a story when he doesn’t know the rest. He wants to wait and share it with her when it’s done.
    “Nothing exciting?” she asks. He shrugs again and jumps onto her bed. “What do you think you’re doing?” she says.
    “Cuddling with you,” he says, wedging himself under her arm.
    “What if I wanted to read?” she asks. This is a silly question, because the whole time he’s been reading, she hasn’t picked up her book. He can’t blame her: it doesn’t look very interesting. It’s very long, and it’s a history of dancing. Not fun dancing, but theater dancing. It has a ballerina on the cover, and even she doesn’t look like she’s having a good time.
    “I don’t think it would be very fair,” he says, “for you to read when I don’t have a book.”
    “So I should stare off into space until you fall asleep?” She’s basically been staring into space for the past twenty minutes, so he can’t imagine why she’s upset about it all of a sudden.
    “You should tell me a story,” he says, wriggling in, resting his head on her stomach so that her breath lifts and lowers it.
    “What season do you want?” she asks.
    “When do Frazer and Campbell become friends?” asks Alex. His meeting with Brett earlier has him thinking about friendship, about how it can be a process or a becoming. He has friends in New York, but it just happens. Put two kids in a room, or in a park, and they’re friends right away. Sometimes his mother will take him to a playground and say, “Go make friends,” and it’s that easy. At least it was when he was littler, but that, like everything else, was bound to change.
    “Season two,” she says.